The Las Vegas Massacre Report and the Rise of Second Amendment Nihilism

The evidence reminds us that the attempt to attach a motive to mass killing—as with many individual murders—is, as often as not, a mistake.

Photograph by Roger Kisby / Redux

A document, recently released—“LVMPD Criminal Investigative Report of the 1 October Mass Casualty Shooting,” to give it its official name—offering the local-police-department summary of the Las Vegas gun massacre of last year, makes for reading that is both hallucinatory and tragic, and in another way absurd. The tragic part comes from the earnest police effort to quantify, tabulate, and graph the actual, horrific effects of machine-gun bullets ripping apart human bodies. We know that each name on the map of casualties—fifty-eight deaths, alongside more than eight hundred wounded, victims left helpless as an invisible storm of death rained down on them during a country-music concert—is a center point from which an unimaginable arc of suffering and grief radiates. But what are the investigators to do but dutifully mark them down? Drawing lines around bodies is what police are supposed to do, in domestic homicides and mob murders. What else is there to do here?

At the same time, it’s hallucinatory to see how little all of the admirable and well-understood procedures that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department—like those of every police department in the country, evolved to deal with violent crime, including mass shooters—could do to halt the massacre before so much damage had been done. In the report, the language of “crime scene analysts,” “lock interrogation documents,” and “key witnesses” is intact even in describing how Hell opened a portal on a happy country-music crowd. This sergeant reached out to that security expert, who spoke to this member of the SWAT team, and decisions were made to force entry—but was that “service cart” in front of the door perhaps an improvised explosive device?—and, meanwhile, a man with incredibly powerful weapons was killing helpless people. The massacre ended when the murderer put a gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. (“Entrance: roof of mouth with abundant soot”—the autopsy of Stephen Paddock, the killer, explains.) The many obscene weapons of mass death he had collected are photographed as they were found in his hotel room, with their specifications delicately included in the captions: “AR-10 .308/7.62 with a bipod and red dot scope. No magazine.”

And it’s absurd, in a mad way, because the premise of the killings was one that no other civilized country would have tolerated for a moment. Paddock bought fifty-five guns, mostly rifles, in the space of a year—most of them the kind of lethal weapons properly called assault rifles or military-style weapons, several augmented with an accessory known as a bump stock, which allowed for even more rapid firing. There is no reason on earth why any citizen of a democracy would ever need even one of these weapons, let alone fifty-five. Not to mention that the simple act of buying that many weapons of murder might be a sign that murder was being planned—an alert missed.

The report takes on the supposedly baffling question of Paddock’s motive, and what comes through is that—unless some astonishing new connection or fact appears in the future—his intention appears to have been purely nihilistic. Paddock wanted to kill a lot of people because he wanted to kill a lot of people. Feelings of frustration and insufficient power, the frequent ignition of such killings, may have moved him, too, and yet they seem to have been more unrooted than such feelings usually are among mass killers. He came from a troubled family, but had managed to acquire money, a girlfriend, an occupation. Basically, it seems to have been an item on his bucket list. He knew that the one thing he could do before he died was murder a lot of people. Why did he want to kill a lot of people? Because he wanted to kill a lot of people. So, he Googled any number of cheerful outdoor concerts, in California and Chicago and also in Las Vegas, and made reservations at hotels looking down on them, and kept buying weapons of mass murder, and finally, there he was, a little god of death.

It’s hard for us to accept that it was as inconsequential as this, but all the evidence suggests that it was. And it reminds us that the attempt to attach a motive to mass killing—as with many individual murders—is, as often as not, a mistake. Killings, whether their perpetrators are fairly called “mentally ill,” can be motiveless in significant ways. Many of the most famous assassinations in our history were so strangely under-motivated that there’s still an odd imbalance between the reason and the act, including Lee Harvey Oswald’s killing of John F. Kennedy. Pure opportunism seems to count for a lot for a man with a weapon.

But then it is in the nature of human violence that there can be a very tenuous connection between the decision to take the act and the desire to perform the act. The motive of the act, the desire, can be in wild disproportion with its effects—or not in any logical way connected at all. That’s what Dostoyevsky and Camus struggled to show to us in art: that the logic of murder was almost always an illogic. One doesn’t have to be grounded in a motive as large as a human life in order to take a human life, much less fifty-eight.

In a horrific way, that side of mass violence is familiar; what makes the American epidemic so appalling is that the nihilism at the heart of Paddock’s acts has now communicated itself to those who attempt to defend it in his right to own fifty-five guns, designed only to kill as many people as possible, in the name of some distorted idea of American liberty. We have entered a new phase in the American horror—that of Second Amendment nihilism. No effort will be made to stop gun massacres. This is, in practical terms, indistinguishable from arriving at a state where the point of having lethal weapons in private hands is to have massacres become ritual sacrifices to be greeted, as all ritual sacrifices are, with prayers. The massacres have become essential to the demonstration of the power of guns, a kind of tribute to the Moloch of absolute autonomy, to a fantasy view of “liberty” that involves the destruction of another person.

Nor can the fight between gun sanity and gun fetishism rationally be called a “culture war” any more than the Civil War was a culture war, rather than, as it really was, one in which human compassion met traditionalized cruelty. One side wants to end the American plague of gun massacres; the other side does not want to end the American plague of gun massacres. Culture wars do exist; people do fight ferociously over symbols. But, if words are to have any sense at all, the phrase “culture war” needs to refer to things that are indeed cultural. The argument over kneeling at N.F.L. games is of that kind: one side believes that the assertion of patriotism overwhelms the demands to appeal for justice, the other that an appeal for justice is what patriotism is all about. Culture wars rightly refer to disputes in which the symbolic or public show of something is what’s at stake. Fights over the legality of crèches on Christmas lawns are culture wars. The right to burn the flag, pro and con, is a culture war.

But mass murder is not a symbolic problem. If you are burning the flag with someone wrapped inside it, then you are no longer making a cultural statement. If, while kneeling on the field, you have your knee on someone else’s neck, it is no longer a symbolic protest. You are attempting a criminal act. What people who talk about gun violence as a “culture war” in which both sides deserve respect really mean is that their right to a fetishized object of power has become so fanatical that they are prepared to ask other people to allow their children to be murdered at concerts rather than interfere with it.

Fantasy and fetishism, as any psychiatrist knows, are intimately linked. The fetishized object—the gun—creates the fantasies of its necessity. Given the new state of the Supreme Court, and the nature of the Trump White House, Second Amendment nihilism may be the reigning position in the American gun debate for all the future we can see. Its participants can congratulate themselves on the triumph of their obsession. Its price is more needless death.

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of “The Table Comes First.”